Social Media Mistakes Your Business Can't Afford

Social media is relatively new in the grand scheme of things, and a lot of companies don’t have much of a presence in that space. If that’s you, that’s your first mistake right there. Nowadays, when people want customer support or to give feedback, they don’t reach for their phone. They head to Twitter and check whether you have a profile there.

Twitter itself may or may not suit your business, but it’s definitely important to be available on social media in some way or another. Here are some other mistakes you need to avoid.

1. Trying to be everywhere at once.

If you have a Twitter account, it’s important that you actually make it valuable and keep it up to date. Same with having a Facebook page. So you need to think about what your priorities are and what suits your company: do you think you can engage with your customers best on Twitter, on Facebook, or somewhere else entirely? You don’t want to have to dash from one site to the other, always trying to catch up. Pick one, and stick to it.

2. Failure to engage.

It’s not enough just to tweet out a link or two every so often. When people are looking for you online, they’ll get a strong impression of your activity and engagement just from how often you post. The abandoned Twitter account from 2013 is worse than never having had a Twitter account at all, because it shows that you’ve dropped the ball.

3. Paid followers.

There’s all kinds of services that promise followers to inflate your follower counts on sites like Twitter. It might sound appealing – after all, it’ll make you look popular, right? But there’s no real point in doing it. It can make your profile look spammy, rather than popular, and suggest that your account has no real value. You need to build followers organically, by posting useful content. Better a smaller follower account than thousands of spambots.

4. Failure to interact with your followers.

If someone sends you a message asking how to do something, you should respond – and promptly. Even if Twitter or Facebook isn’t the best place to answer the question, you should make sure you provide them with enough info to solve their problem – even if that info is just a link to the troubleshooting forum you already have.

5. Nothing but tech support.

The questions will probably roll in as soon as you have a social media account. “Hi, how do I retrieve a forgotten password?” “Why do you send me so much email?” “I want to move my account to your service.” It’s important to get answers to all of these out there, but it’s also important that your feed has other, genuine content (especially if all the tech support makes it look like your product is buggy!). Depending on your audience, that might be relevant articles on business matters, or it might be playful tweets with memes and jokes. Gauge your audience.

6. Not having a social media manager.

It might seem like overkill, but if your business is going to scale, you need to think about it. You need to have a single person who is nominated to deal with this stuff – even if their main job is just to sign on once a day, answer a couple of queries and then sign off. Someone needs to have ownership of it, or your social media account will be a ghost ship.

7. Being overly promotional.

You’ve got an ideal audience on social media – people who are presumably following your account because they want info on your brand and potential offers. But don’t go overboard. If every other tweet is an exhortation to check out the latest deal, it stops being useful to people and just becomes an annoyance that their eyes skip over.

8. Forgetting calls to action.

What’s a call to action? It’s what you want your followers to do once they see your post. Want them to retweet it? Say so! Need them to click through to a survey? Put the link right there with the words “click here”. It’s a frantic world and your tweet or post is just whizzing across their dashboard. It might not be visible in five minutes. So let them know what you want them to do, and make it nice and easy to follow through.

9. Being vague.

Just tweeting a link isn’t good enough – that won’t get people’s attention. Instead, you want to include a call to action or something which will intrigue them. If you link to a relevant article, then say something about it: “Predicted this back in 2015, remember?”.

Social media offers you a whole world of opportunities to get people engaged, and even to get word-of-mouth publicity going. This is something you need to get right, so make sure that there’s time and thought put into it – even if that’s in the shape of hiring someone with the specific role of taking care of it.

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I currently work for the transcription company, Global Lingo, on a freelance basis, and I have previously worked for Dr Crockett of Dewsbury Hospital. I have a wide range of experience in transcription, research, writing and data entry ...